A Shelbyville shop owner is still shaking his head in amazement and gratitude after postal employees returned a large amount of cash he had lost.

By Lisa King

W Cromwell owner Billy Andriot stands beside the mailbox in front of the Shelbyville Post Office that he accidentally dropped a large amount of cash into. He got all of the money back three days later in the mail.

Billy Andriot, co-owner with his wife, Geri, of W. Cromwell men’s shop at Wakefield- Scearce Gallery, accidentally dropped his day’s bank deposit for his shop into a mailbox when mailing some letters on April 21.

He and his wife when to lunch, and upon leaving the restaurant, he said he missed the envelope he was going to take to the bank.

“There were six or seven one-hundred dollar bills in it and some checks, about fourteen-hundred dollars altogether,” he said.

“Then it hit me what I must have done.”

Andriot hurried back to the post office and told workers what had happened, and the postmaster, Chip Robinson and another employee, Brandon White, tried to locate the deposit, but it had apparently already been shipped out to Louisville for sorting.

The cash and checks were in an envelop with no address and no stamp, and the envelop wasn’t even sealed, Andriot said, although the envelop did have his store’s name on it.

“I just wrote it off,” he said. “Because I knew if somebody looked in that envelop and found that much cash, the temptation would just be too great, especially in these hard times. There was a little piece of Scotch tape on the lip of the envelope, though, that one of the girls who works in the store put on it, but still…”

Andriot said he berated himself all that weekend.

“I was in a hurry, and I had a million things on my mind,” he said.

“And I felt bad, too, for Chip and Brandon, because they had tried so hard to help me and couldn’t,”

Then Monday he got a big shock when the mail arrived.

“I went out to get the mail and was walking back in the store, and I was flipping through it, and there was this envelop from the post office, and I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh!’ and when I opened it, my heart jumped up into my throat,” he said.

In the absence of Robinson, who is on vacation, Shelbyville Post Office employee Spud Brock explained how the post office tracked Andriot’s envelop down.

“He had dropped it in an outgoing mail box, and we don’t sort through that. We just gather it up and send it to Louisville, and that’s where the sorting is done,” he said. “It was just a matter of making some phone calls and getting in touch with their lost-and-found department in Louisville, and once Chip was able to identify it, it was recovered and sent back here.”

Andriot said he is so grateful to the postal office, to the employees here in Shelbyville, and to that unknown employee in Louisville who sent his money back.

“The post office catches a lot of flack sometimes, but they have some good people there, because it took somebody with a lot of heart to send that much money back to the person it belonged to,” he said.

Brock said that everyone at the post office was excited when they learned that Andriot had gotten his money back.

“Our goal is always customer service, and we are always retrieving items that people drop into mail receptacles that they don’t mean to put in there,” he said. “We are always excited anytime we are able to get things back to people.”

Brock said he wanted to stress that all the credit should go to the postmaster.

“Chip went above and beyond and did everything he could to make sure the gentleman got his property back,” he said.

“They were just great,” Andriot said of the Shelbyville Post Office. “They were so concerned for me, because they knew how upset I was. I just want to thank them so much and I just want the community to know how blessed we are to have such good people at our post offices, because they really care about people.”